Poetry, Art, Medicine & Society

‘Cuda

Yesterday, when you called me from where
They wring your body in rehabilitation,
And cried like static into the phone,
I wanted to say, this is not you anymore,

Forget your life as it is, let the receiver
Fall away as I do, summer, sandalled women
Along endless asphalt, black turf, glory again
Years ago, enough for both of us. Remember

How you used to swear there was nothing
Close, nothing that would ever shut you down,
Your `71 `Cuda, with its bored and blown
426 Hemi? Well, I believed you, racing

Alone all night in my bunk while our parents
Snored or tried to make another brother
Through the wafer-board walls. Rather
Than sleep I would listen for the chance

Screech and roar at an intersection
Rising somewhere from the gold sphere
Of mist that uptown became at night, sure
That it was you, and pretend I rode shotgun

Through that traffic of shadows, defending
Every stop light and woman on the boulevard
From the hated college boys whose lacquered
Foreign two-seaters were left finding

Second gear. Older, I cruised with you
And your girlfriends, smelled their beer
As perfume, watched you make them wet right there
On the leather seat; and I’m sorry now

I lied about my own nights, still a virgin
At sixteen when I followed you into
The mill. You said if there was any true
Likeness to the innards of an engine

In this world it was that place: metal dust
Searing as ash, arrow showers of sparks, booms
That swung and plunged while fires loomed
In vats; all day the roar ground us, a blast

Of steam down our throats, the world red hot,
Water cooled, sweat oiled. I know we’re both
Big, and you were bigger, with a bad mouth
And a good right, but when that plate hit

Your back, I knew you’d never walk again.
In the facility that you lived to loathe,
Where the spoon quivered each day to the mouth,
They claimed your hands might come back and then

Maybe your sex. Your wife wants children,
And you can’t stand to think she’ll bear
Only you, alive but miscarried somewhere
Inside yourself, the way that car you can

Never drive, sits eaten by rain out back
With half a tank of gas, and lets the weeds
Embrace it with slow ruin. Go on, you said,
Take it, and finally I did, for your sake,

But I won’t drive it. I still punch a clock
For the men born in white shirts and paisley
Ties, whose parted hair flutters in the AC
Of their offices. Their armpits used to reek

With real sweat under the exertion of facing me
While I helped all those adjusters and lawyers
Right the wrong, so you could lie for years
Totally snowed with Darvon. Sometimes I see

Their wives turn as I pass, to second the praise
Of my snug work clothes, the smell of Paris rising
From their breasts, because now that you’re nothing
I’m the one they take raw and finish with their eyes.

All their laughing smiles remind me of a night
When I raced beside you, loving the whiff
Of high octane that seemed to never wear off
Your skin. We waited by the black iron gates

Of the University, the supercharger you bolted on,
Simmering, until an Austin-Healey nosed the line
At the light. The driver flicked his thumb down
While his blonde shook her head and laughed. On green

You let him have a length, and then all
At once, so smoothly, so evenly, your foot
Bore down the throttle like a man who puts
His root inside a woman because they will

Never have anything else, your Firestones
Scorching in every gear, your hand tossing
The shifter as the drive train whooped in passing,
The sidepipes emptying like 12 gauge shotguns.

Shuddering with sheer torque, you sucked the chase
Right out of them. But pulling up at the light,
They were still laughing. They just sat
And loved it because they didn’t care, because

They didn’t give a goddamn what a true-
Run, boost-snorting, big block motor could do.

—David Moolten

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David Moolten

About me: I'm the author of three books of poetry, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Primitive Mood, which won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and was published in 2009.

I'm also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine, and I live, write and practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Audio Files

'Cuda(Originally appeared in The Kenyon Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright(Originally appeared in The Southern Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright

I don't yearn for their steep excursion
Into fame and fortune, for it had
The usual price, and Orville died bitter
And Wilbur died young. I envy them
Only the slender and empty distance they left
Between them and a seaside's grassy bluffs
In mild December, the frail ingenuity
Of dreams, a lifetime's hopes made of string and cloth
And a little puttering motor that might have run
A lawn mower if the brothers had put their minds
To one first. For dumb exhilaration, nothing --
Not an F-16 thundering from its base
In Turkey nor my redeye circling O'Hare --
Comes close to what they must have felt
For less than a shaking, clattering minute
Clearing all attachment to the world
Of dickering and petty concerns: for some
No other heaven. So I take note of them
As they took notes from the lonely buzzard, obsessed
To the point of love with the ghostly air
And the small fluttering things that wandered
Through it. Eccentric but never flighty,
Bookish but not above nicking their hands
In bicycle shops and basements, they lived
With their sister and tinkered with the future.
Propelled by ambition, the mandate
It invents, they still heeded the laws
Of nature, trimmed needless weight, saw everything
Even themselves as burden, determined
Not to crash and burn. Sheer will launched them,
Good will, because those first forty yards
Skimming shale and reeds were for everyone.
Face down between the struts, staring at the ground
As it blurred past, they failed like anyone
To grasp the implications. But legs flailing
They hung on, buoyed by never and almost
And then just barely. I could do worse
Than their brief rapture, their common sense
Of purpose. Or I could, if only
For a moment, exalt them, go along
With the jury-rigged myth, the quaint
Contrivance that lets them rise above it all.

Guy Glass, MD, MFA, Clinical Assistant Professor Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics Stony Brook School of Medicine I am a psychiatrist who writes plays and has several professional productions and published plays to my credit. Having recently earned an MFA in theater from Stony Brook University, I […]

Richard Selzer and Ten Terrific Tales by Tony Miksanek, MD Family Physician and Author, Raining Stethoscopes If there were a Medical Humanities Hall of Fame, physician-writer Richard Selzer (1928-2016) would be a first-ballot selection. And likely by a unanimous vote. The diminutive doctor had a very large presence in the […]

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David, this narrative poem is totally engaging. It’s got a lot of emotive power. I see what you mean — it’s so real we assume it’s confessional on some level. But the fictionalised narrator I do not assume to be you even if you’re using the first person. That shouldn’t give you too much angst.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Irene. I don’t know how many times I heard from people that I’d crossed a line with this. It’s good to hear that not everyone thinks a first person narrator is the poet unless otherwise indicated.

There is certainly a lot of powerful and personal imagery here, I can well understand people thinking it biographical. One thinks there is bound to be an element of truth, of experience. There is relief and a tinge of sadness to realise the lie.

There is an element of experience, just not first hand. I’ve known people quite closely who had hard working lives. The fabrication was in assuming their identity rather than just portraying them. I found that immediacy created more power, and I couldn’t resist it.

David, this is an excellent piece of work. I read your explanation at RWP no the writing process for the poem. Unfortunately, people who do not understand the mechanism or the woven threads in much of the poetry written have no concept of allegory or metaphor. If someone were to read all my poetry, I’m 66 and have been writing since I was twelve, and believed the words preserved on paper would find an unbelievable life. They would be right in their perception. Imagined or not, I could identify with your thoughts (even though I am now the patriarch in my family, no big brother to contemplate). Maybe those of us who practice the art are in reality poetic visionaries. Our dreams and interpretation of life do not have to be real to be relevant. They have only to be written! It is up to the reader to draw the influence and consequences through their own frame of reference. Belief is the framework of reality,most poets work in the diaphanous realm of imagination. Thanks for this work. I thoroughly enjoyed your intellect.
Regards,
DH

Thanks for your perceptions and perspective. I agree with you completely when you say “Our dreams and interpretation of life do not have to be real to be relevant. They have only to be written!,” very well stated. I think a great deal of this is recent tradition (oxymoronic as that sounds). The assumption of confession I think follows the trending towards that sort of poetry in the late 50s and 60s (Lowell, Plath, etc;). If one goes back, one finds a good bit of invention with the first person voice. One also finds some confessional things as well of course. But I think it’s gotten harder to be unrestrained in the first person voice simply as a matter of convention. Perhaps that can be resisted.

Rarely do I assume writing to be truth but see it as experience intertwined and re-braided to be enjoyed, re-read and to induce a bit of memory/wish to the reader. This piece is strong and full of reference to icons that bring thoughts spilling from the past. Sweet.

David, I am swooning and snapping here. I LOVED this piece — your use of language, how vivid and descriptive your images were, the emotion evoked from this piece. At this point, I really don’t care about the fact or fiction quality of the piece. I would love to hear this read out loud. I’d have to say my favorite lines were: “Your wife wants children./And you can’t stand to think she’ll bear/Only you, alive but miscarried somewhere/Inside yourself,”. AWESOME! Thank you for sharing with us.

I’m thrilled that you were this affected by the poem. Thanks for reading it and commenting so extensively. As for hearing it aloud, there actually is a video player on my blog–I made a fairly simple slide show video for ‘Cuda a while back.

I did, reading this. Like any good fiction, this pulls together believable details (I’m too damn close to the age of that ‘Cuda’s “experience”), and brings the reader in to care: brothers, wife/love, impotence, class: all gather emotions in a short and evocative epic.

Thanks Dave. While I don’t have a brother, and never worked in a steel mill, I was adopted by the “motor heads” at my high school, and even inherited my mother’s barracuda when she bought a new car. It wasn’t the monster in the poem (it had a 318 small block V-8) but I did put headers, glass pack mufflers and white letter tires on the car and burn a lot of gasoline driving around aimlessly.

A sweeping tragedy in the tradition of visceral, working-class realism — the solidarity of two brothers, the class conflicts, the sexual mores, the gritty pits of labor, the rivalries of young men, the mythic Cuda car. In this poem steeped in masculinity, the hero is emasculated, both literally and metaphorically — crushed within the innards, the engine, of the mine, killed by the very machinery he loves. Terrible, unbearable ironies. Even though I have no brothers or sons to provide me with first-hand knowledge, I believed every word of this tale, and I was deeply moved by the sad story.

Thanks for taking the time to come back to this and to write such insightful commentary. This poem, despite the tangent it takes away from my own life-experience, has somehow figured importantly for me in my writing life, and perhaps on others levels as well. I appreciate your thoughts.